To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wi

Here the companies are offering a wide range of benefits and this led to employess pick those most important to them
So we need a cause effect relationship. and clause followed by comman ving modifer does the same very clearly
(A) Correct benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them
here those refers to benefits and them refers to employees and ving (letting.....) is correctly modifying previuse clause
(B) Incorrect benefits, letting employees pick the most important of them to themselves
In one sentence them and themselves must refer to the same entity but here in this sentence them and themselves refer to different noun
(C) Incorrect benefits and letting employees pick the most important to themselves
Pick what? not clear
(D) Incorrect benefits and let employees pick the most important to them
Pick what? also in this sentence cause effet nature is lost
(E) Incorrect benefits and let employees pick those that are most important to themselves
Same as D

To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them.

(A) benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them “Those” clearly refers to “benefits” and “them” refers to “employees”. Also, the clause beginning with “, letting” tells us of the effect of companies offering a wider range of benefits. Correct answer.

(B) benefits, letting employees pick the most important of them to themselves The reflexive pronoun is not needed here. Further, it is unclear what “them” and “themselves” refer to.

(C) benefits and letting employees pick the most important to themselves It is not clear what is being picked here.

(D) benefits and let employees pick the most important to them The presence of “and” tells us that we need to look for parallelism. “Offering” is not parallel to “let”

(E) benefits and let employees pick those that are most important to themselves The presence of “and” tells us that we need to look for parallelism. “Offering” is not parallel to “let”

- Nitha Jay

Dear Friends,

Here is a detailed explanation to this question-

Meaning is crucial to solving this problem:
Understanding the intended meaning is key to solving this question; the intended meaning of this sentence is that some companies are offering a wider range of benefits and as a result are letting employees pick those most important to them.

Concepts tested here: Meaning + Parallelism + Pronouns + Redundancy/Awkwardness

• A pronoun can only be used to refer to one noun in a sentence.
• Any elements linked by a conjunction (“and” in this sentence) must be parallel.
• The introduction of present participle ("verb+ing"- “letting” in this case) after comma generally leads to a cause-effect relationship.
• Reflexive pronouns are used when the subject and object of a sentence is the same noun.

A: Correct. This answer choice uses the phrase “letting employees pick”, conveying the intended meaning – that some companies are now offering a wider range of benefits and as a result are letting employees pick those most important to them; please remember, the introduction of the present participle ("verb+ing"- “letting” in this case) after comma generally leads to a cause-effect relationship. Further, Option A correctly uses the pronoun “them” to refer to only one noun, “employees”. Moreover, Option A avoids the reflexive pronoun error seen in Options B, C, and E, as it does not employ a reflexive pronoun. Additionally, Option A avoids the parallelism error seen in Options D and E, as it employs no conjunctions. Besides, Option A is free of any awkwardness or redundancy.

B: This answer choice incorrectly uses the pronoun “them” to refer to the noun “benefits” and the pronoun “themselves” to refer to the noun “employees”; please remember, a pronoun or its derivatives can only be used to refer to one noun in a sentence. Further, Option B incorrectly uses the reflexive pronoun "themselves" in a sentence wherein the subject and object are not the same noun; please remember, reflexive pronouns are used when the subject and object of a sentence is the same noun.

C: This answer choice alters the meaning of the sentence through the phrase “and letting”; the use of “and” incorrectly implies that some companies are now offering a wider range of benefits and as a separate action are letting employees pick those most important to them; the intended meaning is that some companies are now offering a wider range of benefits and as a result are letting employees pick those most important to them. Further, Option C incorrectly uses the reflexive pronoun "themselves" in a sentence wherein the subject and object are not the same noun; please remember, reflexive pronouns are used when the subject and object of a sentence is the same noun.

D: This answer choice alters the meaning of the sentence through the phrase “and letting”; the use of “and” incorrectly implies that some companies are now offering a wider range of benefits and as a separate action are letting employees pick those most important to them; the intended meaning is that some companies are now offering a wider range of benefits and as a result are letting employees pick those most important to them. Further, Option D fails to maintain parallelism between “offering” and “let”; please remember, any elements linked by a conjunction (“and” in this sentence) must be parallel.

E: This answer choice alters the meaning of the sentence through the phrase “and letting”; the use of “and” incorrectly implies that some companies are now offering a wider range of benefits and as a separate action are letting employees pick those most important to them; the intended meaning is that some companies are now offering a wider range of benefits and as a result are letting employees pick those most important to them. Further, Option E fails to maintain parallelism between “offering” and “let”; please remember, any elements linked by a conjunction (“and” in this sentence) must be parallel. . Additionally, Option E uses the needlessly wordy phrase “those that are most important”, leading to awkwardness and redundancy. Additionally, Option C incorrectly uses the reflexive pronoun "themselves" in a sentence wherein the subject and object are not the same noun; please remember, reflexive pronouns are used when the subject and object of a sentence is the same noun.

Hence, A is the best answer choice.

To understand the concept of "Comma + Present Participle for Cause-Effect Relationship" on GMAT, you may want to watch the following video (~3 minutes):



All the best!
Experts' Global Team

To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them.

(A) benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them
(B) benefits, letting employees pick the most important of them to themselves
(C) benefits and letting employees pick the most important to themselves
(D) benefits and let employees pick the most important to them
(E) benefits and let employees pick those that are most important to themselves

EMPOWERgmatRichC ,daagh , mikemcgarry , egmat , GMATNinja , RonPurewal , other experts!! Please help !

In the OA - A, we have 2 plural pronouns in the underlined part that refer to two different antecedents - those refers to benefits and them refers to employees
.Is this usage acceptable as per GMAT?
In the example available in the below link, we eliminate choice because there is an ambiguity with respect to usage of a possessive pronoun "their" in choices in which "they" refers to a different antecedent.
I know neither those or them is a possessive pronoun, but nevertheless, want a clarity on whether the usage of 2 plural pronouns to refer to different antecedent is acceptable ?

https://gmatclub.com/forum/while-depres ... 91967.html

To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them.

(A) benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them
- correct as is

(B) benefits, letting employees pick the most important of them to themselves
- "of them to themselves" = redundant.

(C) benefits and letting employees pick the most important to themselves
- "and letting" = incorrect, b/c it makes it sound like this is a second action in a list. "letting" is not the primary verb in the sentence, it ranks lower in importance than "offering", almost like a modifier

(D) benefits and let employees pick the most important to them
- same as "C". "and let" should be "letting"

(E) benefits and let employees pick those that are most important to themselves
- same as "D"

Key here is to understand there are 2 verbs ("offering" and "letting") -- so your job is to find out whether they're EQUAL in importance. If not, which verb is "lower" in importance? That would be "letting".
- Once you get this, you can immediately eliminate C, D & E (b/c they have "and letting/let" which makes it seem like "letting" is of equal importance to "offering"), so you have a 50/50 shot
* Problem with "B" is wordiness. "pick the most important of them to themselves" = redundant. Of course they're going to pick the most important OF THEM. Of what else??


Kudos please if you find helpful

I came across this useful thread on "them" vs "themselves".
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/112223/among-themselves-or-among-them

He shot himself subject and object are the same, but in He shot him they're not --> We use reflexive pronoun when the subject and object are the same. In our case, the subject is "companies" and the object is "employees". Thus, we can't use a reflexive pronoun here.

Correct usage will be "them" in our given sentence.

To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them.

(A) benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them -Correct
(B) benefits, letting employees pick the most important of them to themselves -incorrect usage of themselves
(C) benefits and letting employees pick the most important to themselves -incorrect usage of themselves
(D) benefits and let employees pick the most important to them -incorrect parallelism
(E) benefits and let employees pick those that are most important to themselves -incorrect usage of themselves

Really good question, Skywalker18. And I'm not sure that you'll find the answers very satisfying.

I think that it can be really confusing when two consecutive pronouns refer to two different antecedents, and the GMAT generally frowns upon that type of usage. (Here's an example in a recent QOTD: https://gmatclub.com/forum/qotd-paper-p ... 49765.html). The key word there is "generally", though. As with most things on the GMAT, there are exceptions.

The important thing to remember is that the GMAT doesn't see pronoun ambiguity as an absolute rule. Yes, pronoun ambiguity is important, and you should notice it and think about it when you have the opportunity. But it's not necessarily WRONG. If, for example, all of your answer choices have the same pronoun ambiguity, then it's a non-issue -- and that's exactly the case in this question. Or if the other answer choices have more severe errors, then the pronoun ambiguity might be "trumped" by some other mistake.

Bottom line: yeah, you should be pretty suspicious whenever they give you two consecutive pronouns that refer to different antecedents. But don't assume that the answer choice is automatically wrong in that situation until you're sure that you have better options.

For more on ambiguity, check out our YouTube webinar on pronouns.

B: some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick the most important of them to themselves
C: some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick the most important to themselves
E: some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those that are most important to themselves
In each of these options, the prepositional phrase in red is an adverb serving to modify important.
Since important refers to benefits, the following meaning is conveyed:
HOW are the benefits IMPORTANT?
They are important TO THEMSELVES.
This meaning is nonsensical: benefits cannot consider themselves important.
Eliminate B, C and E.

D: are offering...and let
Here, are offering and let are not parallel.
Eliminate D.

The correct answer is .

Choice A clearly conveys the author's message that 'Some companies intend to offer a wider range of benefits to their employees, so that the employees can choose the benefits that are most important to them (the employees)' --> Correct

Choice B distorts the meaning with the use of 'most important of them'. --> Pick the most important of the benefits to themselves... Incorrect

Choices C, D, and E have parallelism errors. Incorrect

The answer is A

Present Participle letting correctly modifies the preceding clause .
A correct
B is wrong as it is redundant for use of themselves.
C the clause after and does not have subject hence wrong and wrong to use themselves here .
D Parallelism is not maintained here
E Again parallelism is not maintained here and use of themselves is wrong here

GMATNinja

Am I correct in this reasoning,
If the option would have been 'benefits, letting employees pick those most important to themselves'

Then this reflexive pronoun would refer to companies and not the employees? As the subject is companies.

Please let me know if I am correct

Regards
Anugrah

So I think you're suggesting this version of the sentence:

To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to themselves.

But I think you might be confusing two different issues -- there's the pronoun, and then there's the "-ing" modifier.

Just like any other pronoun, the reflexive pronoun "themselves" does not automatically need to refer to the grammatical subject of the sentence -- really, there's no reason why you would look at ANY type of pronoun and automatically assume that it has to refer back to the grammatical subject. A pronoun can refer to an object or a subject. The GMAT only cares that the pronoun actually makes sense, and refers to a noun that's nearby enough to avoid any confusion. (More on pronouns in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhN_KU1bSKU.)

And in this particular version of the sentence, "themselves" would seem to refer to the most recent plural noun -- and that's "employees", not "companies."

I think you might be thinking of something else, though: in situations like these, an "-ing" modifier will either modify the subject of a clause or the entire clause -- but either way, the "-ing" modifier must "make sense" with the subject of the clause.

So in your example, "...some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to themselves...", it's true that "some companies" has to be the subject that "performs" the action "letting employees pick...". (More on "-ing" words in this article.) But there's no reason why the pronoun "themselves" needs to have anything to do with the subject, "some companies."

So maybe the "-ing" modifier was what you were thinking of?

I hope this helps!

Hi,
GMATNinja
I have a doubt in your reasoning for option D. I think, when we deal with parallelism, a tense mismatch is least likely to be an issue. What difference I felt in option D is:
It is talking about the most important benefit i.e an employee can have only one benefit, whereas original sentence is saying that an employee can choose multiple benefits, which he likes.
What's your opinion ?
Thanks in advance.

To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them.

(A) benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them
(B) benefits, letting employees pick the most important of them to themselves
(C) benefits and letting employees pick the most important to themselves
(D) benefits and let employees pick the most important to them
(E) benefits and let employees pick those that are most important to themselves


Let's look at this way. There are three pronouns namely those, them and themselves. There is no problem with 'those' because it earnestly modifies most important benefits.
However, 'themselves' has a logical problem. The companies are offering the benefits, and after offering them to the employees, it is not logical to say that they would want to keep them to themselves. Therefore as a first job, we can remove B, C, and E in one stroke.

Between 'those' in A and that in D, the plural 'benefits' validates 'those' rather than the singular 'that.'

A range means from something to something. It may not be reasonable to assume that a company will give a variety of benefits to each of its employees.

Therefore A.

You're correct that parallelism fundamentally has nothing to do with verb tense. This, for example, is fine:

Charlie ate houseplants as a child, eats eight meals a day as an adult, and will weigh as much as an aircraft carrier someday.

No problem, right? The three verbs are parallel, and there's no reason why we can't refer to three different time periods in the same sentence. We do that all the time in real life, and it's fine on the GMAT.

But in (D), I'd argue that there's no good reason to use two different tenses:


Why the heck would we say that companies "are offering" a wider range of benefits (implying that it's happening right now), but then say that companies "let" employees pick the most important to them (simple present tense, which describes a general characteristic or state of affairs)? There's no good reason for the tenses to be different in this case.

As far as the issue about "the most important" vs. "those most important", I would agree that "those most important" is much more obviously plural, and I think it's a bit clearer. But "the most important" can also be plural!

The most talented football players in the world are Messi, Ronaldo, Salah, and Pulisic.

No problem, right? Sure, I'd prefer the phrase "those most important" because it very explicitly refers back to "benefits", but I'm not sure that "the most important" is WRONG, exactly -- and that phrase certainly isn't always singular.

I hope this helps!

Hello Everyone!

Let's tackle this question, one problem at a time, to find the right answer! Before we get started, here is the original question with the differences in each option highlighted in orange:

To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them.

(A) benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them
(B) benefits, letting employees pick the most important of them to themselves
(C) benefits and letting employees pick the most important to themselves
(D) benefits and let employees pick the most important to them
(E) benefits and let employees pick those that are most important to themselves

Right away, it's clear that there are a couple obvious differences between each option:

1. Using "benefits, letting" vs. "benefits and let/letting"
2. Using "to them" vs. "to themselves"

Whichever direction we choose to go, we will knock 2-3 options out of the running. Let's just start with #1 on our list and narrow down to a few options.

It may seem like these two ways of structuring the sentence are the same, but their meanings are very different:

By saying "benefits, letting employees pick..." = one thing is being offered here
This is a cause-effect statement. When companies offer wider array of benefits, employees have more choices to personalize their plans.

By saying "benefits and letting employees pick..." = two things are being offered here
This means that companies are offering two things: wider array of benefits, and giving them the choice to choose their own plan. This suggests that employees needed approval or permission to make their own choices??

To keep with the original meaning of the sentence, it makes more sense to say that this is a cause and effect statement, rather than saying the company has to give employees explicit permission to make their own benefit plans. Therefore, we can eliminate options C, D, and E because they incorrectly suggest the company is taking two separate actions, rather than one action that has consequences or effects.

This leaves us with only options A & B to choose from. Let's tackle #2 on our list: to them / to themselves.

(A) benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them

This is the CORRECT option because it uses the simplified "to them" to convey the proper meaning. A reflexive pronoun isn't necessary here because it doesn't add any useful meaning or emphasis. If it had said that giving employees extra benefit options "allowed employees to choose for themselves," it would have been fine.

**I understand that this option isn't perfect. One could argue that using the pronouns "those" and "them" is too vague, and if it were up to me, I'd suggest replacing "those" with "the benefits" to be absolutely clear. Sometimes, the GMAT is about finding the best answer among all the options, even if it isn't a perfect answer.**

(B) benefits, letting employees pick the most important of them to themselves

This option is INCORRECT because it uses the same type of pronoun ("them" and "themselves") to refer to two different things. By using two pronouns that are so similar, it's unclear if the phrase "of them" is referring to the employees or the benefits. One could definitely argue that this sentence could be saying that employees pick the most important employees, rather than the important benefits. Also, the reflexive pronoun "themselves" isn't necessary here. It adds no value or emphasis to the sentence, and replacing it with the much simpler "them" would say the same thing, essentially.

There you have it. Option A is the best option!



Don't study for the GMAT. Train for it.

"Letting" in the sentence doesnt seem to be a verb it is a participle that acts as an adjective. please correct me if i am wrong